On the mainland - 20th Feb

My apologies that this post is a day late. We were in Neko Harbour yesterday evening and the mountains there are quite high, so the internet signal got cut off.

One of the interesting things about taking an expedition cruise to Antarctica is that there is no fixed itinerary. Every evening we go to the theatre for the resident experts to answer questions about what we saw that day, and for Kara (the expedition leader) to give us a run down about what is planned for the next day.  But as Kara is fond of telling us - that is just plan A.  By the time we get up in the morning we might already be on plan D.  The cruise ships within the area have to co-ordinate with each other as only one ship is allowed to be at a particular location on a particular day. Also weather conditions may make landing impossible.

The plan for the morning was to go ashore at Orne Harbour. However, when the scout zodiacs went out they discovered that there was a lot of ice and landing conditions were treacherous. Instead the ship sailed on for 30 minutes to another landing spot at Cuverville Island. Here there was an option of going on shore for a hike, or just taking a zodiac cruise around the bay itself. The hike sounded quite strenuous and Denise would not have been able to manage it, so we opted for the zodiac cruise.

It may sound strange, but I find the zodiac cruises are much better in terms of getting a good range of sights and animal encounters, than being stuck in the one place if you go ashore.

Yesterday I saw fur seals at Mikkelsen Harbour and then later in the day several leopard seals at Cierva Cove.  This morning I added crab eater seals to the list. Crab eater seals are the most common seals on the planet. They certainly seemed to be everywhere  around Cuverville Island. Several were playing in the water and swam right up to the zodiac.

During lunch time the ship sailed on  to Neko Harbour, giving us some truly spectacular views out of the dining room windows as we were eating lunch.

We dropped anchor in Neko Harbour around 1.30pm and Denise and I took a zodiac to shore where there was another Gentoo penguin colony.  The parents were busy feeding the chicks and a brown skua was taking a bath in a small pond of snow melt. This was actually our first landing on mainland Antarctica (yesterday morning's landing at Mikkelsen Harbour was on an island).

This evening we attended another cocktail party for first time Silversea cruisers.